Why Modern Goal Setting Leads Us Astray and How to Avoid It

I'm about to take you on an exercise that is going to help you gain a remarkable degree of clarity on why you're here and how your life is destined to unfold. This is an exercise that I'm going to lead you through called the Three Most Important Questions. And for many people, this exercise shifts their life in a remarkable way. More on that in a bit. What are the Three Most Important Questions? It is a set of questions that get you to think and reflect on the life you want to create for yourself. But most importantly, it's a set of questions that extracts you from what I call culturescape programming. What is culturescape programming? All right, imagine this. From the time you are born, you are more than just an animal. Human beings have this incredible propensity to. To visualize, to think, to dream. We are goal driven creatures. From the time we evolved as a species, we evolved to hunt, to pick berries. All of these were goals. But in the modern world, there is no reason to go into the forest and pick berries unless that's your thing, or to hunt unless that's your thing. And so our brains choose a different type of goal, and that goal is an imagined future. The unique thing about a human being is that we imagine future realities. But human beings are programmed like computers. In the great book Sapiens by Yuval Hariri, he says while many animals are born fully formed, right when an antelope is born, within a few hours it can stand up and run. Human babies are born, he says, like molten glass, they can be shaped into anything their parents want them to be shaped into. This is why we can raise someone to be a socialist or a capitalist or a communist, a warmonger or a peacemaker, an engineer or a doctor. We are programmed from the time we are born, and this programming influences our goals. This programming is what I call the culturescape. In my book, the Code of the Extraordinary Mind, I coined the word culturescape to describe that tangled web of beliefs, rituals, ideologies that we are born into. If you're born in the United States or Germany or India or Malaysia, you are all part of slightly unique culturescapes. Yes, culturescapes overlap, thanks to the Internet and Facebook and cable television. But every culture, every religion, every family has their own unique lens of the culturescape. Nothing wrong with that. The culturescape is beautiful. Think about all the incredible things you experience when you travel to a new country. But the problem with the culturescape is that many of its rules make no sense at all. They are rules simply passed down from generation to generation to Generation to generation with no one questioning them. These rules sometimes make life easier. For example, when you wake up in the morning, you know what is the designated breakfast of your culture? You don't have to reinvent breakfast. But many of these rules actually limit us. They force us to put ourselves in buckets. How to act, who to be, how to be in love. What goals to aim for in terms of our relationships, what goals to aim for in terms of our careers, Even if these goals actually extract from our happiness. I grew up in an Indian family in Malaysia. I then moved to the United States. And I was influenced by all of these cultures. The first five years of my adult life. I went deep into engineering. And I went deep into engineering because when I was a teenager, I have this distinct memory of sitting in the backseat of my grandfather's Volvo and him telling me about how I need to study computer engineering to be like Bill Gates. My grandfather was a man who really valued wealth and money, and I thank him for giving me that piece of his culturescape. He also really looked up to Bill Gates. Gates. Because Bill Gates, at that time in the. In the 90s, was the richest man in the world. And so my grandfather said, you have to go into computer engineering. And so I did. I went to the University of Michigan to study electrical engineering and computer science. It was cold in Michigan. The studies were hard, and I barely passed. But I slogged through so that I could someday be a computer engineer. I even got a job at Microsoft. And my family was so proud. Here I was, a young boy, 21, 22 years old, working at Microsoft. Bill Gates even invited the entire freshman class to a barbecue at his beautiful house overlooking Lake Washington. And I remember as a young man going to that barbecue, being in awe, meeting the man my grandfather said I should aspire to be like. And all the other young engineers were there shaking hands with Bill. He was actually cooking burgers for us. Now, Microsoft was a much smaller company back then, right? A lot more intimate and putting burgers on everyone's plate. And I certainly felt this weird feeling. I couldn't go up to shake Bill Gates hand because I realized I hated my job. I truly dreaded being at Microsoft. The work I was doing there just didn't resonate with me. It didn't speak to my soul. I felt I was failing. My manager didn't like me because I was underperforming. And I was dreading waking up every single morning. I observed Bill. I had respect for him. But I realized I don't want to be here I don't want to be an engineer at Microsoft. This wasn't for me. And in the following week, I quit. Well, to be honest, I got myself fired. I was too young, too stupid, too, too, too chicken to actually quit. So I simply got myself fired by spending a day when I should have been working, playing computer games. Age of Empires, if you must know a Microsoft game, really, really, really good. My manager caught me, I got fired on the spot, and I left Microsoft. I'd spent five years of my life following my grandfather's advice, studying computer engineering, barely passing. I never liked my studies, but I studied it anyway. I then got the job that I was told I should be aspiring for. And I found that I was miserable. But getting fired from Microsoft and leaving Seattle was one of the most pivotal shifts in my life. I remember being in the taxi cabin, going to Seattle airport, looking at the scenery of the city, knowing that I had given up my job, my apartment, the beautiful free bicycle that Microsoft had given me. And I had no idea what I was going to do. But that was when I decided to stop following the rules that society had imposed on me and try to discover things by my own. I sought to identify what really sparked me. I wanted to travel. I didn't want to work in programming, I wanted to work with people. I wanted to work for an ngo. And so I ended up moving to New York and getting a job at a nonprofit that focused on world peace. Was a nonprofit called isec A I E S E C. And what ISEC did was they exchanged students between countries to create cross cultural collaboration. Now in ISAC, I earned below the poverty line. I was earning 25 grand a year in New York City, couldn't even afford my own apartment. I had to share a room with another employee. But for the first time in a long time, I was truly happy. I got to travel, I got to work with people to help consult students on foreign job opportunities. I got to attend conferences around the world. I got to work on something that I felt was meaningful. Helping create cross cultural understanding for world peace. Through isec, I was finally following my heart. But that wasn't all that happened. You see in Steve Jobs famous Stanford commencement address, he drops a line that really makes me tingle every time I hear it. He says, you can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards. And what he means by that is that there are certain dots, areas in our life that when we look back, we can often see a beautiful design, a grand plan leading us to where we are. Maybe this is true for you too. Now Jobs, in that famous Stanford commencement address also said this. Listen to your heart and intuition. They somehow already know who you are to become. I didn't see it then that quitting Microsoft and joining ISAC working for a non profit would create these dots in my life that would connect in beautiful ways. I met the woman that I would marry and stay married to for 17 years. We have two amazing kids and even though we're no longer together, we're good friends and we do our best to raise our children with incredible values. I also met the people who I would later start my company with, mindvalley. All of them worked at ISEC and we met through random connections. That company, mindvalley, is the reason I'm sitting with you here today. ISAC also gave me a thirst for personal growth. And ISAC also gave me a thirst for culture. This is why mindvalley is so diverse in how it's organized. I didn't know it then, but questioning the rules of the culturescape and following my heart led to a much greater outcome than I could possibly have imagined. Yet most of us don't do this. Most of us end up following the pre programmed rules and then waking up one day at the age of 40 going what on earth is happening to my life? You know, if you're in the United States, as soon as you get to university at the age of 18, you already have to start thinking about the track you want to go through. In short, you are asked to choose a career before you can legally buy a beer. The three most important questions is designed to avoid that. To create a life where you don't wake up at 40 questioning your decisions. Where you understand that life is so much richer and has so many more options than we could possibly imagine. But the secret, as Steve Jobs said, is to listen to your heart. You're going to be guided into an exercise to do precisely this. Now there are several ways you can take this program. You can go through all the lessons and lectures today in one go. And you'll be done in about an hour, maybe a little bit more. But you will have a beautiful piece of paper with your three MIQs. Three MIQ is the short form word for the three most important questions. Or you could do this in stages, 15 to 20 minutes every day, and you'll be done in a few days. And at the end of those days you will still have your piece of paper. Now, whichever way you choose is completely up to you. This program is designed to work in either way as a day by day journey or as a program you just dive into. You can also deploy this program to your company or your school. In fact, the three Most Important questions is an exercise that is being used in schools around the world. Check out what's going on in this school in India. I was so happy to receive this email from the teacher. Look at those students. They are filling out their three MIQ questionnaires in this beautiful school in a village in India. Companies around the world also use this exercise. In fact, the very first video I released on the 3MIQ was tweeted by the American Management association and that helped this spread to companies all around the United States. You can do this in your company as well. The process is elegant in its simplicity. You're going to take a piece of paper, landscape style, draw two lines on the paper. I'm going to ask you three questions and each question is going to generate a list by the time you are done. This paper is, in a beautiful sense, going to be a blueprint for your soul. It will help guide you to the right decisions so you end up in a life that is far more fulfilling than you ever imagined. Now, before you go into the three most important questions, there's an important idea I need you to understand. And this idea is the concept of means goals versus end goals. There are two different types of goals that many of us are not trained to see. This nuance, this difference, and this is why we get trapped. In our next video, I'm going to talk about the difference between a means goal and an end goal.